All Wraped Up Being 19

I remember my youth like a sin.
I remember when I found my home
in a bar, drunk by noon.
I remember a few faces,
a few names,
a few stories.
Us regulars were the people
life forgot,
time forgot,
we forgot.
We were broke,
and we decide it was better
to stay that way.
It hurts less.
We were no longer fragile,
just cold and callus.
They'd see me writing:
"Hey kid, why do you always have
your head buried in a notebook
and not in some young pussy?"
Truth is I age in dog years
and I was a dirty old man
before I was legally old enough to drink.
I'd hit the wall and was spiraling
like blood down the drain.
But it didn't matter.
How much can you know about
yourself if you've never gone crazy?
I was too smart for the word then,
too smart to pray,
too stupid to ask for help or give in.
My alter was a long wrap around bar
and my sacrament was consumed
daily, and some nights it was
thrown up in an alley twenty feet away.
I was drunk on youthful apathy
but god damn was I alive.
Each generation has a defining moment.
Elvis the pelvis, Woodstock,
CBGB's circa '73...
Mine was a dive bar at the turn of the century.
The human mind has one
common flaw, it glorifies mediocrity.
But there was no glory there.
There was just whiskey,
old crooners on the juke,
and misery.
We were the broken people that
we'd forgotten about.
And that's the way we liked it.